Friday, 23 July 2010

Our Summer cruise in the Euroblogosphere has taken us to eight destinations, resulting in as many blog entries, but the tour is far from over.

The lack of specialists in EU-oriented blogs is impeding the development of the European online public space, wrote European online communications expert Mathew Lowry.

Waggener Edstrom and Fleishman-Hillard had noted what can be summed up as the lack of influential sector-specific policy bloggers, leading Lowry to explicate that all Eurobloggers are experts, but their specialisation is the EU, with dire results:

Which makes us a tiny, hyperspecialised bubble, talking about EU arcana noone else understands - and, increasingly, talking about ourselves. With barely any bridges connecting us to other online conversations.

According to Lowry, it’s up to the Brussels Bubble to build those bridges outwards if we want to create a European online public space, and if that’s what we want, then these connections are going to be built on specialist subjects.

In a natural way, growth leads to coverage of more policy areas and variety of views being expressed, including national angles on EU issues.

What more is needed? Let us play the Advocate (advocates diaboli or advocatus Dei) to the Tagsmanian Devil in a future post.

Ralf Grahn

P.S. Multilingual comment policy: In order to facilitate interaction in the Euroblogosphere, feel free to comment in Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish or Swedish, even if the Grahnlaw blog and my possible replies are in English.